Biden, Clinton were a hit

SINGING ENDORSEMENT: Jon “Bowzer” Bauman, best known as a singer with the 1950s rock-and-roll revival band Sha Na Na, loves Ohio Democratic politics. He showed up at a Tuesday rally for U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown at the United Auto Workers Local 1112 union hall in Lordstown.

During a brief conversation, I suggested we do a duet of “Blue Moon,” a Sha Na Na staple, with me taking the high notes and him doing the baritone. Before I could start, Bowzer sang the end part. A nice job — changing the “Blue Moon” end to “Vote Sherrod Brown” as he did last year with “No on Issue 2” — but denying me the opportunity to harmonize.

Also at the event was columnist Connie Schultz, Brown’s wife. As Brown started his speech, Schultz tried to signal to him to speak into the microphone. When that failed, she yelled to him to do it, which drew laughter from several people, including Brown, who then introduced his wife to the crowd. Brown took the mic out of its stand and walked with it as he talked about his re-election.

President Barack Obama was a no-show at his rally with former President Bill Clinton at Youngstown’s Covelli Centre.

But he did have a legitimate reason. He was back at the White House monitoring then-Hurricane, now-Superstorm Sandy, which caused major damage to portions of New Jersey and New York. The president did campaign earlier Monday in Orlando.

With Vice President Joe Biden replacing Obama, the campaign made what seemed like a smart move.

The arena was originally set up to hold up to 6,000 people with about 8,000 tickets given away to the free rally. A campaign source said turnout for these events, particularly because of the heavy rain, is about 50 percent.

The capacity was scaled back to hold 4,500 with room for a few more. Turns out 4,800 got inside.

Depending on who you talk to, those who didn’t get inside were 100 or so (from a Vindicator reporter outside) to 1,000 (according to Mahoning County Democratic Party Chairman David Betras).

And most of those not allowed in came late to the event. That may not have been their fault as the campaign started the rally earlier than originally scheduled and that message didn’t reach ticketholders.

Unlike any presidential political event I’ve attended, this one started early — by about 20 minutes.

No complaints from me as I was there for about 90 minutes before it started.

Clinton and Biden seemed to be attempting to one-up each other, which made both of their speeches interesting and long.

But the crowd was very enthusiastic, which is the goal of such rallies.

Both blasted Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, for a controversial campaign TV ad that states Chrysler is “going to build Jeeps in China.”

It came a week after Romney said he read an article that Chrysler “is thinking of moving all production [of Jeeps] to China.”

Then came a Romney radio ad that states: “Under President Obama, [General Motors] cut 15,000 American jobs, but they are planning to double the number of cars built in China, which means 15,000 more jobs for China. And now comes word that Chrysler plans to start making Jeeps in, you guessed it, China.”

This didn’t please officials with Chrysler calling the Romney claims “inaccurate.” A GM spokesman said, “We’ve clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days.”

Various media outlets deemed the commercials to be “misleading,” particularly because of Romney’s statements last week.

The Covelli pep-rally was a fiasco fueled by arrogance and stupidity. They gave out too many tickets, number one, then they started early- apparently not thinking about people from other areas struggling to get there. Result: hundreds of people standing in the rain unable to get in. It was a perfect, picture book display of arrogance and the contempt shown by the Democrats (the People's Party!!??) for their followers.

Marshall McLuhan-- remember him?- famously said: "The Medium is the Message." What that means is you have to look not at what people are telling you, but the sub-text, the connotation, the nuance. The Vibes.

And the Vibes I've been getting for years now from the likes of Davie Betras and Mikey Morley and Jimmie Traficant and the Hanni Gang, etc., etc. ad nauseum- is arrogance, arrogance, arrogance, stupidity, stupidity, stupidity- and unlimited corruption.

When are the people of the Mahoning Valley finally going to say: "Enough. Enough. Enough"???

Posted by WilliamSwinger (anonymous) on November 4, 2012 at 8:58 p.m.

@Island

The poll you mention is a lie. That is exactly why the dems in the MSM cannot be trusted. MSN and NBC are deeply intermingled.

"The likely voter pool in this survey included 38 percent who said they were Democrats, 29 percent who said they were Republicans, 32 percent who said they were Independents and 1 percent who said they had another affiliation."

"The same poll found 45% of likely voters in Ohio consider themselves “conservative” and only 23% claim to “liberal” and yet they still show Obama up six."